Good way to debug stack value corruption

Question

What is a good way to debug stack value corruption. In a program of mine sometimes the address of the this pointer gets changed after a method returns that does a shutdown on a file descriptor. I debugged the program for hours but I can not find the problem.

What is a good method to find out what changes the address of the this pointer? When I manually add a watch on the this pointer the error would not occur. The error still occurs when I strip down my code as much as possible. I tried Valgrind but it does not find any early stack corruption.

I managed to detect when the error occurs, I compiled the code in 64 bit mode. The address of this changed from 0xxxxxxx to 0x1000000xxxxxxx. I check the address of this in the methods where the error occurs, that I found out when the address changes (see the first paragraaf for this).

Is there any other way to find out the cause of this problem?

Answer 1

You might want to give a shot to address-sanitizer. It is available in gcc 4.8:

AddressSanitizer , a fast memory error detector, has been added and can be enabled via -fsanitize=address. Memory access instructions will be instrumented to detect heap-, stack-, and global-buffer overflow as well as use-after-free bugs. To get nicer stacktraces, use -fno-omit-frame-pointer. The AddressSanitizer is available on IA-32/x86-64/x32/PowerPC/PowerPC64 GNU/Linux and on x86-64 Darwin.

In GCC (but apparently not clang), you need to specify -fsanitize=address in both the compiler flags and linker flags, as described in this related answer.